Samsung Portable SSD T5 (500GB) Review

Table of Contents

Introduction, Design, & Features

What's more impressive than pulling out your business card in a client meeting? Pulling out a ton of files in a gadget no bigger than a short stack of business or credit cards. The Samsung Portable SSD T5 won't quite fit into your wallet, but it leaves plenty of room in a pants or shirt pocket (although you'll need to tuck its foot-long USB cable into a pocket too).

It's a good-looking drive that's built to survive drops and bumps and delivers speedy performance at a competitive price. If you can afford its premium over a portable hard drive—$199.99 for the 500GB model seen here—it's a no-brainer.

The T5 is the third generation of Samsung's miniature external SSD, following last year's Portable SSD T3 and 2015's T1 (Samsung skips the even numbers). It combines the company's latest V-NAND flash memory with a USB 3.1 Gen 2 interface for, Samsung says, transfer speeds up to 540MB/sec read and 515MB/sec write.

Your mileage may vary, mostly because many PCs today have USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports, which are no faster than USB 3.0. (See our primer on USB 3.1 and USB-C.) Whichever type of USB port your PC or Mac has, however, will work fine, since the T5 comes with both USB-C (drive) to USB-C (computer) and USB-C (drive) to USB-A (computer) cables. Also, Windows and macOS aren't your only operating system choices: Downloadable software lets the T5 work with Android devices.

The T5 does not have a rubber bumper around it and is not submersible in water like the ADATA SD700, but Samsung says it can withstand drops of up to 2 meters (6.6 feet). We dropped our test unit several times onto both carpeted and wooden floors with no ill effect.

Formatted with exFAT for out-of-the-box use with any of the three supported operating systems, the T5 was recognized by our Windows laptop as a 465GB drive with 446GB free. Bundled software is on the skimpy side, with no backup utility or tools for drive maintenance, checking cell wear, erasing the drive, or other functions that some competitors offer. All you get, in fact, is software to password-protect the T5 using 256-bit AES hardware encryption.

Double-click on the icon ("It is recommended installation of program files to use Samsung Portable SSD password protection") and you're prompted to enter a password and, if you like, change the drive name that appears on the utility screen. (The name that appears in File Explorer is "Samsung_T5.")

If you forget your password, you've bricked your drive; Samsung can reset the gadget, but takes no responsibility for the data loss that accompanies such a step. Flunk the password test, and the only contents of the T5 you see are the utilities it came with and a note that says, "This is a read-only partition." Successfully enter your password, and you can access a settings screen where you can switch protection off or change the password.

That's it as far as the drive's complexity goes—our test unit was a simple and painless way to enjoy half a terabyte of additional storage, with speed that blew away USB 3.0 external hard drives and the peace of mind of password security to offset the fear of losing the device. Samsung backs the T5 with a three-year warranty.